Zephyr Lake in Spring

A flash piece

Path through the lily pads, 35mm film. Taken by the author.

Boatmen were talking into the night, their voices fiddling through the lake mist. I thought every voice drowned, but tonight the lake ferries theirs over to our window, pulling me from sleep’s depths.

I know the cost to transport a soul, one obol placed in the mouth. How much for a single voice’s vessel? Enough to choke?

My partner doesn’t stir. As a boy, he tailed frogs in the shallows here every June, painted the one-roomed library next to the red boathouse we sleep in tonight, launched a potato cannon in the clearing. He doesn’t question the voices anymore.

When our canoe pulls out of the dock in the morning, our oars sift through lily pads like rusting coins. Sunlight counts silt, coppers the shore. We float in the metallic waters. He tells me that this lake used to have an island that swam, bits of a forest freed and sauntering.

I leave the window open that night, but the voices stay quiet.

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